The Alpha Who Claimed My Fire

Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE: What the Woods Taught Me

Grandma Odette did not believe in coddling, and she proved it my very first morning at her cabin. I woke up to the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of an axe splitting logs outside my window. By the time I dragged myself downstairs, still half asleep, she was already sitting at the table with two cups of tea and a look on her face that told me sleeping in was not going to be a habit here.

"Eat," she said, sliding a plate of eggs toward me. "Then you'll go outside. I've got a garden that doesn't tend itself."

That was how it started. No long talks about my feelings, no gentle questions about Damon or the club or the year I'd wasted loving a boy who was never mine to love. Just work. Weeding the garden. Chopping wood. Hauling water from the stream because Odette refused to fix the pipe that fed her kitchen sink, insisting the walk built character.

The cabin itself was smaller than I remembered from childhood visits, two rooms downstairs and a loft where I slept, everything smelling like pine and old smoke. Odette had built half of it herself after Grandpa Theo died, she told me once, because she refused to let a house fall apart just because a man wasn't there to fix it. I thought about that a lot in those first weeks. How she had rebuilt her whole life alone and never once asked anyone to feel sorry for her.

For the first month, I cried more than I worked. I'd be pulling weeds and suddenly picture Damon's face turning toward that hallway, and the tears would just come, hot and humiliating, right there in the dirt. Odette never told me to stop. She'd just keep working beside me, letting me cry it out, and when I was done she'd hand me the next tool and say, "Alright. Back to it."

"You're not going to tell me it'll be okay?" I asked her once, wiping my face with a dirty sleeve.

"No," she said. "Because I don't know if it will be. What I know is that sitting here crying won't grow these tomatoes, and it won't grow you back into a person either. Only work does that. Only choosing, every single day, to do something other than fall apart."

It was the hardest, truest thing anyone had said to me in years.

There was a morning, maybe three weeks in, when I refused to get out of bed at all. I lay in the loft listening to Odette moving around downstairs, waiting for her to come up and coax me down the way my mother would have. She never came. Around noon, hunger finally won, and I climbed down to find her sitting on the porch, whittling a piece of wood into nothing in particular.

"Feeling sorry for yourself is heavier than any axe I own," she said, not even looking up. "Carry it as long as you want. Just know you're the one carrying it."

I didn't have a response for that. I ate cold eggs standing at the counter and went outside to finish weeding the row I'd abandoned the day before.

Slowly, without me quite noticing when it happened, the crying spells got farther apart. I started sleeping through the night. My hands, soft and useless when I arrived, grew calluses from the axe handle and the garden hoe. Odette taught me to hunt with a bow, patient through my first dozen failed attempts, sharp-tongued when I got lazy about my stance.

"Elbow up," she'd bark from behind me. "You're not swatting a fly, girl, you're feeding us dinner."

I missed more shots than I care to count that first season. A rabbit I'd tracked for twenty minutes bolted the second my arrow went wide. A deer at the tree line simply turned and looked at me, almost bored, before wandering off unbothered.

Odette laughed at that one so hard she had to sit down on a fallen log.

"Fated mates," she said one afternoon, watching me miss a shot for the fifth time in a row. "Everybody in that pack acts like it's the only thing that matters. Like finding your mate is the whole point of being a wolf. You know what I think?"

"What?" I asked, resetting my bow.

"I think fate's just biology with a fancy name. It tells you who your body wants. It doesn't tell you who deserves you, and it sure doesn't build character. That boy could have been your fated mate ten times over and it still wouldn't have made him worth loving if he didn't have the spine to treat you right. You hear me?"

I lowered my bow. "I hear you."

"Good. Now shoot straight this time."

I hit the target that time, dead center, more from spite than skill, and Odette just nodded like she'd expected it all along.

Months passed like that. Autumn turned the trees around her cabin gold, then bare. We spent whole afternoons stacking firewood in silence, the kind of silence that used to make me anxious back home, like I had to fill it with something. Out here, silence just meant working. Winter buried the whole valley in snow that Odette made me shovel myself, refusing to let me feel sorry about the cold in my fingers.

"Cold builds patience," she told me, watching me struggle with a drift taller than my knees. "Complaining just makes it colder."

By the time spring came, I barely recognized the girl who had shown up at her door with a duffel bag and cut-up feet. I stopped flinching when I thought about Damon. I stopped rehearsing conversations in my head where I finally said the perfect thing that would make him regret everything. Somewhere in that year, I realized I didn't actually want him to regret it for my sake anymore. I wanted to stop needing his regret at all.

Odette taught me things beyond gardens and bows. She taught me to argue back when I disagreed with her, something I had never done with Damon, not once in six years. The first time I snapped back at her over something small, some chore I thought was unfair, she actually smiled.

"There she is," she said. "Wondered when you'd show up."

"What do you mean?"

"The real you. The one who has an opinion and isn't afraid to say it out loud. You buried her pretty deep trying to be whatever that boy wanted. Good to see her again."

I thought about that a lot, lying awake at night in her guest room. How much of myself I'd folded away, piece by piece, over six years, just to stay small enough to fit beside Damon Reyes. How easy it had been to mistake that folding for love.

Some evenings, once the chores were done, Odette would tell me stories about the pack politics she'd walked away from decades ago, about Alphas who ruled through fear and Alphas who ruled through respect, and how the difference always showed eventually, no matter how long it took. I didn't understand yet why those stories mattered so much to her, or why she seemed to be aiming them at me specifically. I would understand later.

By the time a full year had passed, I could hunt, I could chop a full cord of wood without stopping, and I could look at my own reflection without flinching at what I saw. My shoulders had filled out from the work. My voice had gotten steadier, less apologetic, less eager to smooth things over before they even needed smoothing. I still thought about home sometimes, my parents, even Sasha and Priya, wondering if they ever thought about me at all. But the ache had turned into something quieter, something I could carry without it dragging me under.

I had no plan to go back. Ravenwood Ridge had made its choice about who mattered there, and I had made mine about who I wanted to become. I thought I had years left out here with Odette, learning, healing, becoming, content to let the pack forget me the way I was slowly forgetting how much it used to hurt.

On the morning of my one-year anniversary at the cabin, though I didn't realize the date until Odette pointed it out over breakfast, she set down her tea and studied me for a long moment, the way she did when she was about to say something that mattered.

"You know," she said, "when you showed up at my door, I gave you six months. Figured you'd get restless, miss your parents, miss that soft little life you were used to, and go running back before the first snow. You proved me wrong."

"Is that a compliment?" I asked, only half joking.

"It's a fact," she said. "Compliments are for people who need convincing. You already know what you did out here. I'm just saying it out loud so you remember it on the days you doubt yourself again, because there will be days like that. There always are."

I didn't know then how soon those days would come, or how fast the peace I'd built with her would be tested. I was wrong. It only took one phone call to change everything.